Review/Theater: A Streetcar Named Desire; Alec Baldwin Does Battle With the Ghosts

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 13, 1992

Depending on your feelings about "Long Day's Journey Into Night," "A Streetcar Named Desire" is either the greatest or second-greatest play ever written by an American. But actors have to be half-mad to star in Tennessee Williams's drama on Broadway, where the glare is unforgiving and the ghosts of Elia Kazan's original 1947 production, as magnified by the director's classic 1951 film version, are fierce. Stacked against Marlon Brando, the first Stanley Kowalski, and Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh, the stage and screen originators of Blanche DuBois, who can win?

The exciting news from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where Gregory Mosher's new Broadway staging of "Streetcar" arrived last night, is that Alec Baldwin has won. His Stanley is the first I've seen that doesn't leave one longing for Mr. Brando, even as his performance inevitably overlaps his predecessor's. Mr. Baldwin is simply fresh, dynamic and true to his part as written and lets the echoes fall where they may. While his Stanley does not in the end ignite this play's explosive power, that limitation seems imposed not by his talent but by the production surrounding him and, especially, by his unequal partner in unhinged desire, Jessica Lange's Blanche DuBois.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Baldwin imbues Stanley with an animalistic sexual energy that sends waves through the house every time he appears onstage. The audience responds with edgy delight from when he first removes his shirt and unself-consciously uses it to wipe the New Orleans sweat from his armpits and torso. Yet the actor's more important achievement is to bring a full palette to a man who is less than a hero but more than a brute. Cruel as Mr. Baldwin's Stanley is, and must be, he comes across as an ingenuous, almost-innocent working stiff until Blanche provokes him to move in for the kill. His Stanley is funny in a post-adolescent, bowling buddy way as late as the rape scene, when he fondly emulates a cousin who was a "human bottle-opener." Even the famous interlude in which he screams for his wife, Stella (Amy Madigan), becomes pitiful as well as harrowing when Mr. Baldwin, a fallen, baffled beast, deposits himself in a sobbing heap at the bottom of a tenement's towering stairs.

Not the least of the actor's achievements is to remind us why Williams's play is so much more than the sum of its story of Stanley's battle with the sister-in-law who invades his and Stella's shabby French Quarter flat. "I am 100 percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth," Stanley rightly bellows at one point, after Blanche has taunted him one time too many for being a "Polack." He fills the play with the America of big-shouldered urban industrialism, of can-do pragmatism, of brute strength and vulgar humors: the swaggering America that believes, as Stanley paraphrases Huey Long, that "every man is a king." Mr. Baldwin makes it easy to see how Blanche and the ambivalent, self-destructive author for whom she is a surrogate could find this simian, menacing man mesmerizing even as he embodies the very forces on a "dark march" to destroy them and their romantic old America of decaying plantations, kind strangers and "tenderer feelings."

That destruction, which is the inexorable tragedy of "Streetcar," remains untapped here because Ms. Lange's Blanche leaves the play pretty much as she enters it: as a weepy, uncertain yet resourceful woman who has endured some hard knocks rather than suffered a complete meltdown into madness. A terrific film actress who deserves credit for courageously making her Broadway debut in the most demanding of roles, Ms. Lange can easily be faulted for her lack of stage technique, including a voice that is not always audible and never sounds like that of a lapsed Mississippi belle. But she works harder and more intelligently than all three movie stars put together across the street in "Death and the Maiden," and the real problem with her Blanche is less a matter of deficient stage experience than of emotional timidity.

"I don't want realism, I want magic!" goes one of Blanche's signature lines, but Ms. Lange insists on providing realism. She's not a moth facing disintegration as she flies into the flame but a spaced out, softer-spoken Frances Farmer in her cups. The diaphanous web of artifice that surrounds this heroine, the gauzy lies and fantasies that cloak her as surely as her paper Chinese lantern disguises her room's naked light bulb, never materializes.

Without them, there are no layers of personality for Mr. Baldwin's Stanley to rip through and no chance for the audience to be shattered by the drama of a woman being stripped of illusion after illusion until there is nothing left but the faint, bruised memory of an existence torn between the poles of gentility and desire. In Ms. Lange's resilient characterization, which siphons off much of Blanche's fragility and sorrow into an omnipresent and much-twisted handkerchief, the heroine's wry English teacher's humor survives but the traumatic soliloquies, from the account of her husband's suicide to her late confession of promiscuity, seem thought out rather than felt.

Mr. Mosher, an unerring director of David Mamet's plays, does not seem to be at his best directing women, in "Streetcar" anyway. Ms. Madigan, whose stage work has generally been as accomplished as her screen appearances, captures Stella's Southern gregariousness but not the erotic exuberance and divided loyalties of a young, pregnant wife caught between her husband and her sister. As Mitch, the stolid suitor Blanche sees as a protector, Timothy Carhart still seems to be playing the coarse redneck of "Thelma and Louise." He is physically wrong for the role and anachronistic in tone and appearance.

What Mr. Mosher does achieve in his production is an impressive display of a director's stagecraft. Except for the placement of intermission, this "Streetcar" is meticulous in its efforts to conform to the well-documented Kazan original, which played the same stage almost 45 years ago. Ben Edwards's brooding and decaying indoor-outdoor set, Kevin Rigdon's poetic lighting, the floating fragments of music and even the questionable dropping of the curtain at the end of each scene all respect tradition, to the cautious point of treating "Streetcar" as a museum piece.

While this approach does not permit many surprises, it does allow an audience to appreciate the baroque architecture and verdant language of a play that never ceases to fascinate, even in readings far inferior to this one. When the electric Mr. Baldwin is onstage, you can, for better and worse, imagine the bold new "Streetcar" that has been allowed to slip away. A Streetcar Named Desire